Thursday, September 28, 2006

In the spirit of You can never have sufficiently many
media players, I now have Helix Player working under
Emacspeak i.e.,
I can now run Helix Player without having to start up X. This is
useful because there are still media streams on the Web that
sometimes fail with mplayer, and from the minimal
testing I've done so far, Helix Player is successful in those
cases.

What Is It?

HelixPlayer --- installable on modern Linux
distributions as hxplay from package
HelixPlayer is the community-supported version of
RealPlayer 10. The well-distributed and documented client,
hxplay
is capable of playing a wide variety of audio and video formats
over HTTP and RTSP/RTP, and specifically, can handle RealPlayer10
formats which includes support for 5.1 audio.

A lesser known set of tools available from Helix ---
Helix DNA Client is a bare-bones UI-less player which can be
used effectively at the shell. You can download pre-built
binaries for your flavor of Linux (GCC3.2 or later vs GCC 2.95
based systems)
note that these are
nightly builds. You can also download a source zip archive. Note
that all of these requires you to accept a
End Users License Agreement (EULA)
before being taken to the download link.

The links on the page above can be confusing; Here are
pointers to the specific packages you need to grab if you want a
player that has all of the functionality described above.

The above script assumes you have the alsa-oss
package nstalled; you will need this to have Helix Player use
ALSA --- something that is essential if you want to be able to
use your sound card with other applications while playing media
streams.

With this setup, you can launch one or more media streams
(both local, as well as remote HTTP/RTSP/RTP streams)
from a shell.
This player successfully plays the BBC Radio4 LW
stream, something mplayer
fails to play on my Ubuntu box.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

On the positive side with respect to software synthesis, the
Software Dectalk does
work out of the box on Ubuntu --- out of the box that
is if you first install alsa-oss the ALSA->OSS
compatibility layer.
I've updated the Emacspeak speech server for Software Dectalk to
use alsa-oss where available; performance is not as
responsive as the Emacspeak Viavoice server using the native ALSA
APIs, but it's a good backup option.

Monday, September 11, 2006

I upgraded my home FC3 machine to Ubuntu 6.0.6 (Dapper) over
the weekend. Here is a short summary for things to watch out for
as an emacspeak user.

The Good, The Bad, And The Painful

Good

One of my friends helped with the install and it is
remarkably quick when everything works (in my case the Ubuntu LTS
6.0.6 installer had trouble with the NVidea display card and
came up correctly at the third attempt).

Bad

A one CD install is nice -- but after it you have remarkably
little installed from the perspective of an emacspeak user. You
end up with a very nice GUI but very little else --- the
reasoning being that the average user wont need much more, and
the savvy user can always run apt-get.

Bad

Worse, Ubuntu does not install openssh-server
--- it limits itself to installing
openssh-client. This means that you cannot bootstrap
yourself by logging in from another machine until you install
openssh-server off the network. If there was one
thing I would ask the Ubuntu maintainers, it would be to rectify
this situation.

Painful

In my case, the apt suite of tools appeared to
have a problem --- they died saying
/var/lib/dpkg/available: no such file or
directory. Googling showed this to be a known problem with
apt and the fix is to run dselect
update -- but if you're new to Debian/ubuntu, this is
less than obvious.

Good

Once you overcome the above, apt-get got me
emacspeak-17.0 which was sufficient to let me bootstrap the rest
of the process on my own using my trusted Dectalk Express to
produce speech.

Painful

Note that you should install tcl8.3 and
tclx8.3 --- rather than the newest (8.4) versions of
these packages.
This is because as of 8.4, the maintainers of those packages no
longer build a stand-alone tcl (extended TCL)
shell. This is something that will have to be handled by
Emacspeak in the future.

Good

I was able to get everything I needed (and more) installed
using a combination of apt-get and
aptitude.

Bad

The IBM TTS engine no longer works --- under FC3 and friends,
you needed to install package libstdc++-compat to
get it to work. Well, there is no corresponding package for
Ubuntu/Debian from what I could find out, and pulling in the RPM
for libstdc++-compat,
converting it via alien and installing the result
produces a segfault when you run the TTS engine.

Bad

For the same reason, the old command-line
trplayer will also not work on Ubuntu 6.0.
This is not as painful --- since mplayer works --- though I had
to build mplayer from source.
It would be nice to create a command-line player on top of the
HelixPlayer code base.
At present, the missing trplayer means that the
etc/rivo.pl provided by emacspeak no longer works.
You can use mplayer to convert
realaudio to mp3; however mplayerdoes
not have a command-line option to specify the duration of
playback,
something that script etc/rivo.pl needs.